Dangerous proportions: Means and Ends in Non-Finite War

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Professor Nehal Bhuta, University of Edinburgh and Dr Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi, University of Amsterdam, give a talk for the Public International Law seminar series.

Philip Alston’s deep worries about the institutionalization of the tactic of targeting killing, the ensuing extension of warfare and its corrosive consequences for any meaningful possibility of scrutinizing the legality of such strikes, proved far-sighted. The chapter focuses on the accompanying re-articulation of the right of self-defense by states active in the war on terror and demonstrate that it has fashioned a set of interconnected legal propositions that we call “revisionist.” This revisionist framework, we show, cumulatively engenders a highly permissive framework for the preventive, extraterritorial, use of lethal force against individuals and non-state groups, with a geographically and temporally expansive scope. We do not argue that this permissive version of self-defence is now lex lata or even de lege ferenda. We also distinguish ourselves from the view that the revisionist framework departs from “the ‘old days’ when the law was allegedly certain” – that is, when the law required a high threshold of effective control by the territorial state over the non-state armed group. Instead, building on Robert Brandom’s Hegelian account of the determinateness of legal concepts, we frame the revisionist framework as a historically-embedded process of determination of the new content of the concept of self-defense. The chapter shows that these conceptual revisions bring with them a reconfiguration of the structure of legal relationships presupposed by the jus ad bellum’s concept of proportionality, and a new (in)determinacy which renders the concept more permissive than constraining.

Professor Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He previously held the Chair of Public International Law at the European University Institute in Florence, where was also Co-Director of the Institute's Academy of European Law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Constellations and a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity. He is also a series editor of the Oxford University Press (OUP) series in The History and Theory of International Law. Prior to the EUI he was on the faculty at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Before entering academia, he worked with Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Transitional Justice. Nehal’s two most recent edited volumes are Freedom of Religion, Secularism and Human Rights (OUP) and Autonomous Weapons Systems - Law, Ethics, Policy (Cambridge University Press with Beck, Geiss, Liu and Kress). Nehal works on a wide range of doctrinal, historical and theoretical issues in international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and human rights law.

Dr Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Asser Institute (University of Amsterdam), a Teaching fellow at SciencesPo Paris and the Managing Editor of the Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law. She holds a PhD in Law from the EUI, entitled “Drone Programs: the Interaction Between Technology, War and the Law”. She currently supervises Master theses in criminal law and public international law at the University of Amsterdam. Her work reflects on how new technologies, together with the law, reshape security practices in the counterterrorism context.

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Public International Law Part III

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Nehal Bhuta

Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi

Keywords

law

war

conflict

Department: Faculty of Law

Date Added: 17/02/2021

Duration: 00:39:29

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The Concept of Race in International Criminal Law - and Beyond

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Public International Law Part III

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Carola Lingaas, VID Specialised University, gives a talk for the Public International Law seminar series.

Members of racial groups are protected under international law against genocide, persecution, and apartheid. But what is race – and why was this contentious term not discussed when drafting the Statute of the International Criminal Court? Although the law uses this term, is it legitimate to talk about race today, let alone convict anyone for committing a crime against a racial group? Who are members of a racial group and how broadly can (and should) the term be interpreted? Can international criminal lawyers draw on human rights law in the interpretation of race - or does the prohibition of analogy and the principle of strict legality bar such application? These and other questions inform the presentation.

The talk builds on the book The Concept of Race in International Criminal Law, which is the first comprehensive study of the concept of race in international criminal law. It explores the theoretical underpinnings for the crimes of genocide, apartheid, and persecution, and analyses all the relevant legal instruments, case law, and scholarship. It exposes how the international criminal tribunals have largely circumvented the topic of race, and how incoherent jurisprudence has resulted in inconsistent protection. By subjecting the problematic concept of 'race' to a multifaceted and interdisciplinary analysis, new interpretations are offered. The study argues that race in international criminal law should be constructed according to the perpetrator's perception of the victims’ ostensible racial otherness. The perpetrator’s imagination as manifested through his behaviour defines the victims’ racial group membership. The conclusions of the study are extrapolated on related cases such as the discrimination of the Sámi indigenous population of Norway.

Carola Lingaas is an Associate Professor of Law, Faculty of Social Sciences, VID Specialized University (Oslo, Norway). She holds a PhD in international criminal law from the University of Oslo. Her dissertation on The Concept of Race in International Criminal Law was published as monograph by Routledge. She has published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, essays, research reports, and blog posts within the areas of international criminal law, human rights law, migration, and trafficking. Current research projects address hate speech against migrants and the Sámi indigenous population, dehumanizing speech as means to construct the genocidal intent, the relationship of religion and law in the crime of genocide, and the influence of politics on the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. Common to most projects is the interpretation of the law in drawing on social science research as well as the focus on matters of identity (e.g. group identities, identity creations, othering, identity fault lines). Carola Lingaas teaches domestic Norwegian welfare law, child protection law, legal method, and human rights law. She is the book review editor of the Nordic Journal of Human Rights and co-editor of an anthology and a special issue.
Prior to joining academia, she worked as legal clerk for the District Court and the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Zürich (Switzerland). She then joined the International Committee of the Red Cross as a field delegate in South Sudan during the Second Civil War. She remained with the Red Cross for more than seven years, first the ICRC, later the Norwegian and Oslo Red Cross. She holds an LLM in public international law from the University of Oslo and a master’s degree in law from the University of Zürich.

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Public International Law Part III

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Keywords

Department: Faculty of Law

Date Added: 17/02/2021

Duration: 00:50:47

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Jamie Stern-Weiner: IHRA: The Politics of a Definition

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Israel Studies Seminar

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Jamie Stern-Weiner (Oxford) traces the genesis and evolution of a controversial 'working definition' of antisemitism.

The Working Definition of Antisemitism was originally presented in modest terms: a common reference point enabling monitoring bodies to collect data in a manner that permitted cross-country comparison. Some 15 years on, a formidable array of Jewish organisations and supportive Governments is lobbying around the world to have the Working Definition of Antisemitism institutionalised across political and social life. This juggernaut is everywhere provoking opposition - albeit disparate and poorly resourced - led by dissident Jewish groups and Palestinians. The Working Definition's advocates argue that, in order to combat antisemitism, one has to define it. This talk will examine the political genesis and instrumentalisation of the Working Definition to ask: Do we need a definition of antisemitism in order to fight it? If so, should it be this one? If not, what purpose does this definition serve?

Jamie Stern-Weiner is a DPhil candidate in Area Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the editor of Moment of Truth: Tackling Israel-Palestine's Toughest Questions (OR Books, 2018) and Antisemitism and the Labour Party (Verso, 2019).

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Israel Studies Seminar

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Jamie Stern-Weiner

Keywords

antisemitism

Israel

Department: School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS)

Date Added: 16/02/2021

Duration: 01:12:06

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Data work: the hidden talent and secret logic fuelling artificial intelligence

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Oxford Martin School: Public Lectures and Seminars

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Professor Gina Neff discusses artificial intelligence and data work, and the ethical and social implications of integrating these tools into organisations.

What happens when new artificial intelligence (AI) tools are integrated into organisations around the world?

For example, digital medicine promises to combine emerging and novel sources of data and new analysis techniques like AI and machine learning to improve diagnosis, care delivery and condition management. But healthcare workers find themselves at the frontlines of figuring out new ways to care for patients through, with - and sometimes despite - their data. Paradoxically, new data-intensive tasks required to make AI work are often seen as of secondary importance. Gina calls these tasks data work, and her team studied how data work is changing in Danish & US hospitals (Moller, Bossen, Pine, Nielsen and Neff, forthcoming ACM Interactions).

Based on critical data studies and organisational ethnography, this talk will argue that while advances in AI have sparked scholarly and public attention to the challenges of the ethical design of technologies, less attention has been focused on the requirements for their ethical use. Unfortunately, this means that the hidden talents and secret logics that fuel successful AI projects are undervalued and successful AI projects continue to be seen as technological, not social, accomplishments.

In this talk Professor Gina Neff, Oxford Internet Institute and Professor Ian Goldin, Oxford Martin School, will examine publicly known “failures” of AI systems to show how this gap between design and use creates dangerous oversights and to develop a framework to predict where and how these oversights emerge. The resulting framework can help scholars and practitioners to query AI tools to show who and whose goals are being achieved or promised through, what structured performance using what division of labour, under whose control and at whose expense. In this way, data work becomes an analytical lens on the power of social institutions for shaping technologies-in-practice.

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Oxford Martin School: Public Lectures and Seminars

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Gina Neff

Ian Goldin

Keywords

artificial intelligence

data

society

technology

Department: Oxford Martin School

Date Added: 16/02/2021

Duration: 00:47:31

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Julian Savulescu and ethical issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic

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St Cross College Shorts

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St Cross College Fellow Julian Savulescu, Uehiru Professor of Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, in conversation with Stanley Ulijaszek about ethics and the COVID-19 pandemic.

St Cross College Fellow Julian Savulescu, Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Uehiru Professor of Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, in conversation with Stanley Ulijaszek about the ethical principles that are important in determining possible responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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St Cross College Shorts

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Keywords

ethics; resource allocation; vaccination; covid; immunity

Department: St Cross College

Date Added: 16/02/2021

Duration: 00:18:42

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The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought

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Middle East Centre Booktalk

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Join us for the fourth MEC Booktalk episode where Dr Usaama al-Azami talks with guest author Andrew March about his new book, The Caliphate of Man: The Invention of Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, published by Harvard University Press, 2021

The book can be purchased direct from the publisher's distributor by emailing cs-books@wiley.com and quoting h0339 for a 30% discount.

Andrew March is Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Masachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of political philosophy, Islamic law and political thought, religion and political theory, and comparative and non-Western political theory more generally. His first book, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus (Oxford, 2009) is an exploration of the Islamic juridical discourse on the rights, loyalties, and obligations of Muslim minorities in liberal politics, and won the 2009 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion.

Andrew has published articles on Islamic law and political thought, secularism, religion and free speech, religious freedom and the boundaries of marriage in liberal society.

The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought examines the problem of divine and popular sovereignty in modern Islamic thought through the Arab Spring. Taken direct from the publisher’s webpage: A political theorist teases out the century-old ideological transformation at the heart of contemporary discourse in Muslim nations undergoing political change.

The Arab Spring precipitated a crisis in political Islam. In Egypt Islamists have been crushed. In Turkey they have descended into authoritarianism. In Tunisia they govern but without the label of “political Islam.” Andrew explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East.

This began with the claim of divine sovereignty, the demand to restore the sharīʿa in modern societies. But prominent theorists of political Islam also advanced another principle, the Quranic notion that God’s authority on earth rests not with sultans or with scholars’ interpretation of written law but with the entirety of the Muslim people, the umma. Drawing on this argument, utopian theorists such as Abū’l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb released into the intellectual bloodstream the doctrine of the caliphate of man: while God is sovereign, He has appointed the multitude of believers as His vicegerent. The Caliphate of Man argues that the doctrine of the universal human caliphate underpins a specific democratic theory, a kind of Islamic republic of virtue in which the people have authority over the government and religious leaders. But is this an ideal regime destined to survive only as theory?

Dr Usaama al-Azami is Department Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford. His research explores the way in which Islamic scholars, known as the ulama, have responded to modernity, especially in the political realm. He is the author of a forthcoming monograph entitled Islam and the Arab Revolutions: The Ulama between Democracy and Autocracy.

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Middle East Centre Booktalk

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Keywords

Department: Middle East Centre

Date Added: 16/02/2021

Duration: 00:35:01

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Gut Instinct Ep.1 - COVID and cancer, ACLF, and the downfall of biomarkers

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Gut Instinct: GI research update

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The first episode! We talk through the impact of COVID-19 on colorectal cancer, transcriptomics in ACLF, the pitfalls of biomarker studies in IBD, microscopic colitis and cancer risk, HBV and PBC treatment, and more...

Gut Instinct Ep.1 - COVID and cancer, ACLF, and the downfall of biomarkers

Please let us know what you think of our podcast! Leave us a review, get in touch on Twitter @GIUpdate, or drop us an email at Gutinstinctpodcast [at] gmail.com.
Episode recap - what have we learnt?
- COVID-19 pandemic has had major impacts on CRC pathways in the NHS, with huge reductions in referrals and procedures in the first wave, leading to a 22% reduction in diagnoses, 3,500 fewer patients diagnosed than expected.
Morris E, et al. Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the detection and management of colorectal cancer in England: a population-based study. Lancet Gastro Hep (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-1253(21)00005-4
- Acute on chronic liver failure is associated with changes in gene expression in immune cell populations, particularly associated with immunometabolism, which may help us develop new biomarkers and potentially treatments.
Li J, et al. PBMC transcriptomics identifies immune-metabolism disorder during the development of HBV-ACLF. Gut (2021). https://doi.org/10.1136/gutjnl-2020-323395
- Disappointingly, a previously reported gene expression biomarker of IBD progression could not be validated in two further cohorts. We need to be cautious, even sceptical, about novel transcriptional biomarkers for disease and prognosis, and seek out multiple independent validation studies.
Gasparetto M, et al. Transcription and DNA Methylation Patterns of Blood-Derived CD8+ T Cells Are Associated With Age and Inflammatory Bowel Disease But Do Not Predict Prognosis. Gastroenterology (2021). https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2020.08.017
- Microscopic colitis is associated with a small increased risk of lung cancer and lymphoma at diagnosis, but a lower risk of CRC over time.
Bergman D, et al. Microscopic Colitis and Risk Of Cancer—A Population-Based Cohort Study. Journal of Crohn's and Colitis (2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/ecco-jcc/jjaa156
- In the real world setting, vedolizumab for IBD shows decent performance in terms of clinical remission, even in patients several years post-diagnosis, and who have been previously exposed to multiple anti-TNF agents.
Mühl L, et al. Clinical experiences and predictors of success of treatment with vedolizumab in IBD patients: a cohort study. BMC Gastroenterol (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12876-021-01604-z
- Treatment of patients with minimally raised ALT and high viral load in CHB reduces the risk of fibrosis progression
Hsu Y-C, et al. Once-daily tenofovir disoproxil fumarate in treatment-naive Taiwanese patients with chronic hepatitis B and minimally raised alanine aminotransferase (TORCH-B): a multicentre, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel-group, randomised trial. Lancet Inf Dis (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30692-7
- Treatment of individuals with PBC resistant to UDCA with add on budesonide does not improve liver histology, but may improve biochemical outcome measures. More trials and novel therapeutics for AI liver diseases are urgently required! This study also underlines the problem of evidence-based medicine in rare diseases.
Hirschfield G, et al. A placebo-controlled randomised trial of budesonide for PBC following an insufficient response to UDCA. Journal of Hepatology (2021). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2020.09.011

Thanks for listening to Gut Instinct!

Episode Information

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Gut Instinct: GI research update

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Department: Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine

Date Added: 12/02/2021

Duration: 00:44:12

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Greek Tragedy at the National Theatre of Prague during the Nazi occupation (1939 – 1945)

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Reimagining Ancient Greece and Rome: APGRD public lectures

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Alena Sarkissian gives public lecture, subtitled 'Theatre as a space of Spiritual Contemplation', on Greek Tragedy in the Czech Republic under Nazi Occupation.

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Reimagining Ancient Greece and Rome: APGRD public lectures

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Department: Faculty of Classics

Date Added: 12/02/2021

Duration: 01:14:59

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Ken Loach in Conversation

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TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

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TORCH Goes Digital! presents Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities.

In this joint event between St Peter's College and TORCH, distinguished and multi-award-winning British filmmaker, social campaigner and St Peter’s College alumnus, Ken Loach (Jurisprudence, 1957), will discuss his filmmaking career with Professor Judith Buchanan, Master of St Peter’s College Oxford. Their conversation will concentrate on two remarkable films: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016).

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TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities

People

Keywords

The Wind That Shakes the Barley

I Daniel Blake

politics

Department: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)

Date Added: 12/02/2021

Duration: 01:11:15

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Gut Instinct: GI research update

Gut Instinct: GI Research Update is a podcast that brings you the latest research in gastroenterology, hepatology, and nutrition direct to your headphones. Hosts Tamsin Cargill and Michael FitzPatrick, gastroenterology doctors and researchers at the University of Oxford, talk you through recent clinical and translational research papers that have caught their eye, with clear explanations, critical appraisal, and (hopefully) a sense of humour.

Twitter (@GIUpdate): https://twitter.com/GIUpdate

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4GN5Y2FduEyqx2t9RbCmHM

Dangerous proportions: Means and Ends in Non-Finite War

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The Concept of Race in International Criminal Law - and Beyond

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Jamie Stern-Weiner: IHRA: The Politics of a Definition

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Data work: the hidden talent and secret logic fuelling artificial intelligence

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Julian Savulescu and ethical issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic

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The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought

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Gut Instinct Ep.1 - COVID and cancer, ACLF, and the downfall of biomarkers

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Greek Tragedy at the National Theatre of Prague during the Nazi occupation (1939 – 1945)

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Ken Loach in Conversation

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Gut Instinct: GI research update

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